The Age of Wonder
Page 40
Davy was deliberately proposing a revolutionary view of science, and for a moment his audience must have believed that the wild young man from Bristol was going to propose political revolution as well. Banks, and others in the front row of the theatre, held their breath when Davy launched into the following declaration: ‘The guardians of civilization and of refinement, the most powerful and respected members of society, are daily growing more attentive to the realities of life; and, giving up many of their unnecessary enjoyments in consequence of the desire to be useful, are becoming the friends and protectors of the labouring part of the community.’149 What French, insurrectionary sentiment would follow from Beddoes’s erstwhile protégé?
Yet Davy knew very well that it would be fatal to raise any suggestion of social revolution, anything that smacked of ‘Continental’ ideology. With a skilful change of pace and direction, he hastened to dispel any vision of a democratic future. On the contrary, ‘the unequal division of property and of labour, the difference of rank and condition amongst mankind, are the sources of power in civilized life, and its moving causes, and even its very soul’.♣
The final version of this passage stands out as deliberately aimed at the aristocratic supporters of the Institution, and must have greatly relieved Banks. Nonetheless, Davy found his own way of emphasising the radical nature of scientific progress, and this too Banks must have liked. He returned to the image of dawning light, but he used it with deliberate British understatement. Science did not deal in extravagant republican dreams, utopian nonsense, or dangerous French political abstractions. It was plain, reasonable, empirical, patriotic: ‘In this view we do not look to distant ages, or amuse ourselves with brilliant, though delusive dreams concerning the infinite improveability of man, the annihilation of labour, disease, and even death. But we reason by analogy with simple facts. We consider only a state of human progression arising out of its present condition. We look for a time that we may reasonably expect, for a bright day of which we already behold the dawn.’150
But this was not quite all. Davy’s final claim for science was an extra ordinary one, and must have much struck Coleridge. Science was psychologically, even spiritually, therapeutic. ‘It may destroy diseases of the imagination, owing to too deep a sensibility; and it may attach the affections to objects, permanent, important, and intimately related to the interests of the human species.’ The value of science was, in this sense, universal, ‘even to persons of powerful minds’, whose primary interests were ‘literary, political or moral’. It strengthened the habit of ‘minute discrimination’, and encouraged a language of ‘simple facts’. But perhaps Coleridge would have felt that Davy was on less certain ground when he added that science tended ‘to destroy the influence of terms connected only with feeling’.151
Among other crucial ideas in the body of the lectures, Davy further explained and popularised the concept of the ‘carbon cycle’, as originally discovered by Priestley and Lavoisier. He presented it as the key to life on earth, a continuous universal recycling of carbon and oxygen between plants and humans. The metaphysical emphasis he gave to this law of harmony in nature may well have influenced Coleridge’s letters and poems on ‘the One Life’, written during the spring and summer of 1802.
Later that year Coleridge worked with Wordsworth on the Preface to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, describing the function and future of poetry. They collaborated on a famous passage connecting the ‘discoveries of the men of science’ with the imaginative work of the poet. Davy was clearly the inspiring figure behind this declaration: ‘If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed.’152
Davy’s success gave him new confidence. When Anna Beddoes came up to London with her sister Maria Edgeworth, he proudly showed them round the Institution in a way that much struck Maria, her sharp novelist’s eye seeing a new character emerging. ‘He was much improved since I saw him last — talking sound sense and has left off being the “cosmology” man. After we had seen all the wonders of the Royal Institution, Mr Davy walked with us and got into the depths of metaphysics in the middle of Bond Street. I don’t know whether he or the Bond Street Loungers amused me most.’153
Davy’s ‘metaphysics’ and charismatic lecture style increased the Institution’s annual subscriptions dramatically, and began to stabilise its problematic finances, much to Count Rumford’s satisfaction (since he had been the Institution’s major private donor). By 1803 Albemarle Street had been designated the first one-way in London, to avoid the traffic jam of carriages on Davy’s lecture days. It was also noticed that he was especially popular with young women, and a cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson shows a commanding, romantic figure holding his mixed audience entranced, with a clutch of young women crowded into the left-hand balcony seats. They are gazing down attentively at Davy, while themselves being ogled by an ancient academic. This was the new science as sexual chemistry.
Another cartoon by James Gillray, ‘New Discoveries in Pneumaticks!’, played on the less romantic but equally popular notion of chemistry as ‘stinks’, and the idea that laughing gas could produce a truly room-shaking fart. Professor Thomas Garnett, Count Rumford and Sir Joseph Banks are all identifiable in this cartoon, and again nearly half Davy’s audiences are women, many of them scribbling notes (or possibly billets-doux).
A French tourist, Louis Simond, described Davy’s electrifying lecture technique, with its special appeal to young students and women. Though his ideas were so radical, he noted that Davy was careful to make conventional references to the beauties of divine creation. Meanwhile he staged spectacular and often dangerous chemical demonstrations, that produced gasps of amazement and bursts of applause. Though some were critical of these performances as mere showmanship, they were skilfully designed as genuine scientific demonstrations, and Davy believed that surprise and wonder were central to a proper appreciation of science. Banks heartily approved.154
Davy’s advancement now became rapid, not to say meteoric. In June 1802 he was promoted from Assistant to full Lecturer. The following year, after another brilliant series on Agricultural Chemistry, he was appointed to the Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, replacing Garnett, who had found himself eclipsed by the young star and quietly resigned. Davy’s salary increases were also rapid. In 1803 he received £200 per annum. In November 1804 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and his professorial salary at the Institution was doubled to £400 per annum. He soon began to receive invitations to give summer lectures in other university cities, notably Dublin, receiving payments that quickly trebled his annual income.
Coleridge, marooned in Keswick in the Lake District and suffering increasingly from opium addiction and marital unhappiness, could still take genuine delight in Davy’s success. ‘I rejoice in Davy’s progress. There are three Suns recorded in Scripture — Joshua’s, that stood still; Hezekiah’s, that went backwards; and David’s that went forth and hastened on his course, like a bridegroom from his chamber. May our friend’s prove the latter!’ Continuing in scriptural mood, he prophesied that Davy in London would have to battle ‘two Serpents at the cradle of his genius’, Dissipation and Devotees, which might degrade true scientific Ambition into Vanity. ‘But the Hercules will strangle both the reptile monsters.’ He still felt a powerful belief in Davy’s scientific mission. ‘I have hoped, and do hope, more proudly of Davy than of any other man … he has been endeared to me more than any other man, by being a Thing of Hope to me (more, far more than myself to my own self in my most genial moments).’15
5
Davy was proud to play that role. The following year, hearing that Coleridge was about to take ship to the Mediterranean, an exile which he secretly believed would be permanent, Davy sent him a magnificent, hyperbolic letter of valediction and encouragement: ‘In whatever part of the World you are, you will often live with me, not as a fleeting Idea but as a recollection possessed of Creative energy, as an IMAGINATION winged with fire, inspiriting and rejoicing. You must not live much longer without giving to all men the proof of your Power … You are to be the Historian of the Philosophy of feeling. — Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature. Do not give up your birthright.’156
The original West Country group of friends was gradually being scattered. Davy continued to write to Southey, now settled in the Lake District, and to Tom Poole, busy with his tanning in Nether Stowey; but he steadily lost touch with Beddoes and King in Bristol. One of the sharpest breaks with his Penzance past came with the news of Gregory Watt’s lingering death from consumption in October 1804, at the age of thirty-two. Watt had delivered a paper on Cornish geology at the Royal Society only the previous spring, and had recently written to Davy, ‘full of spirit’ about his future scientific work. The loss of his old friend shook Davy strangely. He was shocked into writing one of his most reflective and bleak speculative letters, his feelings giving ‘erring wings’ to his religious doubts and his rarely expressed scepticism.
For an uncharacteristic moment, individual ambition and achievement seemed meaningless to Davy: ‘Poor Watt! — He ought not to have died. I could not persuade myself that he would die … Why is this in the order of Nature, that there is such a difference in the duration and destruction of her works? If the mere stone decays, it is to produce a soil which is capable of nourishing the moss and lichen. When moss and lichen die and decompose, they produce a mold which becomes the bed of life to grass, and to a more exalted species of vegetable … But in man, the faculties and intellect are perfected: he rises, exists for a little while in disease and misery, and then would seem to disappear, without an end, and without producing any effect.’157
Nowhere in this bleak and heartfelt letter, written to another Bristol friend, his erstwhile laboratory assistant Clayfield, did Davy mention God, or any conventional notion of heaven. Instead, he tried to tell himself that there was some incomprehensible ‘arrangement’ by which Watt’s unfulfilled gifts would be ‘applied’ by Nature. He drew on a familiar analogy with the transformation of the butterfly, but even this took him in an odd and unexpected philosophical direction: ‘The caterpillar, in being converted into an inert scaly mass, does not appear to be fitting itself for an inhabitant of air, and can have no consciousness of the brilliancy of its future being. We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great and unknown beings … We suppose that we are acquainted with matter, and with all its elements, and yet we cannot even guess at the cause of electricity, or explain the law of the formation of the stones which fall from meteors. There may be beings — thinking beings, near us, surrounding us, which we do not perceive which we can never imagine. We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual immortality of the better part of man.’158
This was the nearest Davy would come to any idea of the soul, or personal immortality. But what is surprising is his notion of mankind, the ‘masters of the earth’, being themselves subject to other and greater masters, alien powers elsewhere in the universe. He did not conceive of these as gods, but more like the extraterrestrial intelligences of science fiction, ‘thinking beings’, close by, but invisible, imperceptible, even unimaginable. He would return to this idea in the last book he ever wrote, Consolations in Travel.
In 1805 Davy branched out and gave his spring lectures at the Royal Institution ‘On Geology’. For this he had read the work of Hutton and Playfair, and grappled with the new controversies about the age of the earth, and whether its rocks were formed by flood or by volcanic action. His demonstrations included a large-scale model of a volcano, mounted on an insulated plate, that innocently emitted smoke, then suddenly burst into flames, and finally erupted in a cloud of ‘ash’. He also recalled his expeditions in Cornwall with Gregory Watt, and delivered a heartfelt elegy on this early, lost friend.159
Davy spent a relaxed summer in the Lake District, and climbed Helvellyn with Wordsworth, Southey and Walter Scott. They talked of Coleridge, who was still absent somewhere in the Mediterranean, and writing home ever less frequently. Davy hoped nonetheless that ‘his genius will call forth some new creations, and that he may bring back to us some garlands of never-dying verse’. He wrote to Coleridge, urging him to return to England and give a course of lectures on Poetry at the Royal Institution.
Davy returned to London to be awarded the Copley Medal by Banks (for some humdrum work on agricultural chemistry), and elected to the Council of the Royal Society. He was also invited to give the important annual series of Bakerian Lectures at the Royal Society, starting the following autumn. There seemed nothing that could now stop his career, and his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-six. But he still needed to achieve a major scientific discovery to secure his name. In October his early hero Horatio Nelson, whose victory at the Nile he always associated with his professional beginnings in science, was killed at the battle of Trafalgar.
11
On 20 November 1806 Humphry Davy gave his first Bakerian Lecture, to a packed theatre at the Royal Society, with Joseph Banks presiding in the chair. It was a prestigious but challenging appointment. The series had been founded in 1775 by Daniel Defoe’s son-in-law, Henry Baker, and dedicated to advances in ‘Experimental Philosophy’. Some genuinely new discovery had to be demonstrated, and Davy was expected to choose as his subject either gases, or geology, or agricultural chemistry. Instead he announced that he would be ‘investigating and elucidating’ the nature of electricity, the use of the new voltaic battery, and the possibilities of opening up a wholly new field of ‘electro-chemical analysis’. The lecture created an international sensation. It would be followed by four more over the next four years: the second Bakerian on 19 November 1807, the third on 15 December 1808, the fourth on 15 November 1809, and the fifth and last on 15 November 1810.160
Davy began his first lecture with a characteristically enticing tour d’horizon: ‘It will be seen that Volta has presented to us a key which promises to lay open some of the most mysterious recesses of nature. Till this discovery, our means were limited; the field of pneumatic research had been exhausted, and little remained for the experimentalist except minute and laborious processes. There is now before us a boundless prospect of novelty in science; a country unexplored, but noble and fertile in aspect; a land of promise in philosophy.’161
He first set out to clarify the nature of electricity, which was still not remotely understood. It was popularly regarded as an invisible and volatile fluid stored in glass Leyden jars, ever ready to leap out with a bang. Against all appearances, Davy argued, the electrical charge stored in Leyden jars or produced by voltaic batteries was no different in kind from that produced by a stormcloud, a ‘torpedo’ or electric eel, or a hand-cranked friction generator, except that it was more manageable and sustained. Moreover, it was energy produced by chemical changes. The tingle produced by acid saliva on a metal tooth filling is just such a chemical change. ‘A plate of zinc and a plate of silver, brought into contact with each other, and applied to the tongue, produce a strong caustic sensation. This is analogous with … the experiment of Galvani, on the excitation of the muscles of animals.’162
Next, he demonstrated that electricity did not itself ‘generate’ matter, as most of his contemporaries thought, but was a form of pure energy. It was, he argued, essentially bi-polar energy, divided into a negative charge (associated with heating and expansion) and a positive charge (associated with cooling and contraction). Lightning, for example, was generated by negatively charged stormclouds meeting positively charged one
s.163 (Modern physics would explain lightning as caused by a massive discharge of static electricity, generated by agitated electrons within a single stormcloud.)
Davy then set out a meticulous series of experiments, using a number of different salts and alkalis, which proved that there was such a thing as ‘chemical affinity’ throughout nature. That is, chemical materials were held together, or bonded, by the positive and negative energies of electricity. By using the voltaic battery as an analytical tool, and ‘decomposing’ various metals and earths by electrolysis (usually over several days), he promised to reveal entirely new elements, hitherto unknown and unnamed. These investigations ‘can hardly fail to enlighten our philosophical system of the earth; and may possibly place new powers in our reach’.164
Throughout, Davy referred confidently to scientific work going on across Europe, notably by Berzelius and Potin in Stockholm, and Gay-Lussac and Thénard in Paris. But he calmly explained that he had corrected, refined or overtaken all of their experiments. He was in effect claiming that British chemistry, for the first time since Hooke and Boyle in the seventeenth century, led the scientific world. This first Bakerian Lecture was both brilliant and challenging, but so far Davy had merely set out his stall. It was not until the revelations of the second Bakerian Lecture that he hoped the full, revolutionary impact of his work would be recognised.
In the interim, Davy spent much of the summer of 1807 either fly-fishing or trying to persuade Coleridge to undertake a series of literary lectures at the Royal Institution. These turned out to be very similar pursuits. Coleridge had returned from Malta inspired and refreshed by his experiences (among other things, he had fallen in love with a Sicilian prima donna), but more hopelessly addicted to opium than ever. Aware of his fragile state, Davy wrote briskly to their mutual friend Tom Poole: ‘In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature and metaphysics must have a healthy influence.’